Edmund Husserl's importance for the philosophy of our century is immense, but his influence has followed a curious path. Rather than continuous it has been recurrent, ambulatory and somehow irrepressible: no sooner does it wane in one locality than it springs up in another. After playing a major role in Germany during his lifetime, Husserl had been filed away in the history-books of that country when he was discovered by the French during and after World War II. And just as the phenomenological phase of French philosophy was ending in the 1960's, Husserl became important in North America. There his work was first taken seriously by a sizable minority of dissenters from the Anglo-American establish ment, the tradition of conceptual and linguistic analysis. More recently, some philosophers within that tradition have drawn on certain of Husserl's central concepts (intentionality, the noema) in addressing problems in the philosophy of mind and the theory of meaning. This is not to say that Husserl's influence in Europe has alto gether died out. It may be that he is less frequently discussed there directly, but (as I try to argue in the introductory essay of this volume) his influence lives on in subtler forms, in certain basic attitudes, strategies and problems.

Dan Zahavi offers an in-depth and up-to-date analysis of central and contested aspects of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. What is ultimately at stake in Husserl's phenomenological analyses? Are they primarily to be understood as investigations of consciousness or are they equally about the world? What is distinctive about phenomenological transcendental philosophy, and what kind of metaphysical import, if any, might it have? Husserl's Legacy offers an interpretation of the more overarching aims and ambitions of Husserlian phenomenology and engages with some of the most contested and debated questions in phenomenology. Central to its interpretative efforts is the attempt to understand Husserl's transcendental idealism. Zahavi argues that Husserl was not a sophisticated introspectionist, not a phenomenalist, nor an internalist, not a quietist when it comes to metaphysical issues, and not opposed to all forms of naturalism. Husserl's Legacy argues that Husserl's phenomenology is as much about the world as it is about consciousness, and that a proper grasp of Husserl's transcendental idealism reveals the fundamental importance of facticity and intersubjectivity.

This book sets the record straight about the greater influence of Dilthey than Husserl in Heidegger's initial formulation of his conception of phenomenology.

Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl explores the relationship between two of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century: Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, considered by many to be his greatest philosophical heir. While Merleau-Ponty's influence on the dissemination and reception of Husserl's thought is indisputable, unresolved questions remain concerning the philosophical projects of these two thinkers: Does phenomenology first reach its true potential in Merleau-Ponty's hands, guided by his appreciation of the tacit goals underlying Husserl's philosophical project? Or is Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology a creative but ultimately misdirected appropriation of Husserl's work? In this volume, the first devoted to a comparison of the work of these two philosophers, ten leading scholars draw on the latest research and newly available manuscripts to offer novel insights into Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl - with implications for our understanding of phenomenology's significance, its method, and the future of philosophy.

The Essential Husserl, the first anthology in English of Edmund Husserl's major writings, provides access to the scope of his philosophical studies, including selections from his key works: Logical Investigations, Ideas I and II, Formal and Transcendental Logic, Experience and Judgment, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, and On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. The collection is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century philosophy.

Von Hermann's Hermeneutics and Reflection, translated here from the original German, represents the most fundamental and critical reflection in any language of the concept of phenomenology as it was used by Heidegger and by Husserl.

Despite an ever-growing scholarly interest in the work of Edmund Husserl and in the history of the phenomenological movement, much of the contemporaneous scholarly context surrounding Husserl's work remains shrouded in darkness. While much has been written about the critiques of Husserl's work associated with Heidegger, Levinas, and Sartre, comparatively little is known of the debates that Husserl was directly involved in. The present volume addresses this gap in scholarship by presenting a comprehensive selection of contemporaneous responses to Husserl's work. Ranging in date from 1906 to 1917, these texts bookend Husserl's landmark Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The selection encompasses essays that Husserl responded to directly in the Ideas I, as well as a number of the critical and sympathetic essays that appeared in the wake of its publication. Significantly, the present volume also includes Husserl's subsequent responses to his critics. All of the texts included have been translated into English for the first time, introducing the reader to a wide range of long-neglected material that is highly relevant to contemporary debates regarding the meaning and possibility of phenomenology.

In this first book-length study of the topic, Robert C. Scharff offers a detailed analysis of the young Heidegger’s interpretation of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of historical life and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. He argues that it is Heidegger’s prior reading of Dilthey that grounds his critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. He shows that in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, a “possible” phenomenology is presented as a genuine alternative with the modern philosophies of consciousness to which Husserl’s “actual” phenomenology is still too closely tied. All of these philosophies tend to overestimate the degree to which we can achieve intellectual independence from our surroundings and inheritance. In response, Heidegger explains why becoming phenomenological is always a possibility; but being a phenomenologist is not. Scharff concludes that this discussion of the young Heidegger, Husserl, and Dilthey leads to the question of our own current need for a phenomenological philosophy—that is, for a philosophy that avoids technique-happiness, that at least sometimes thinks with a self-awareness that takes no theoretical distance from life, and that speaks in a language that is “not yet” selectively representational.

Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.

The purpose of the text is threefold: 1] to contribute to the renaissance of Husserl interpretation around a) the continuing publication of Husserl's manuscripts and b) his unpublished manuscripts; 2] to account for the historical origins and influence of the phenomenological project by articulating Husserl's relationship to authors before and after him; 3] to argue for the viability of the phenomenological project as conceived by Husserl in his later years. In regard to the last purpose, Luft's main argument shows that Husserlian phenomenology is not exhausted in the Cartesian (early) perspective, which is indeed its weakest and most vulnerable perspective. Husserlian phenomenology is a robust and philosophically necessary perspective when taken from its hermeneutic (late) perspective. And the ultimate point Luft makes in the text is that Husserl's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers, namely, Cassirer, Heidegger and Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl's focus centers on the work the subject must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide his/her unreflective relationship to the world. In making his argument, Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl's own writings-from early to late-around the guiding themes of: 1] the natural attitude; 2] the need and function of the epoché; and 3] the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.